Where Is Your Bookmark? (What I Was Reading Then & Now / My Poetry TBR / BBHOP)

A weekly meme where readers share the first sentence of the book they are reading and say what they think. Hosted by the amazing Gillion Dumas of Rose City Reader.

Editor's Note: 

The majority of urban legends form around a small grain of truth, however misinterpreted or misunderstood. [Opening of Angel of the Overpass by Seanan McGuire]

A weekly meme in which readers share a random sentence or two from page 56 or 56% of the book they are reading. Hosted by the wonderful Freda of Freda's Voice.

"When you're a teenage girl who's just died, continuing to exist as yourself feels a lot like living. I ran from Bobby Cross after he ran me off the road because I wanted to live. I was already dead. That didn't make a lick of difference to me then, and it doesn't make a difference to me now. Assuming a heartbeat matters is . . . It's small and it's prejudicial against the dead, and it's wrong." [Opening of Angel of the Overpass by Seanan McGuire]

I recently started reading the third book in Seanan McGuire's Ghost Roads series called Angel of the Overpass. It is one of my favorite urban fantasy novel series. I love how the novel opens with a fictional editor's note, the first sentence of which I shared above. I have not yet reached the Friday 56 excerpt, and so I am not sure who Rose is talking to. 

Lady of shadows, keeper of changes, plant the seeds of faith within me, that I might grow and flourish, that I might find my way through danger and uncertainty to the safety of your garden. Let my roots grow strong and my skin grow thick, that I might stand fast against all who would destroy me. Grant to me your favor, grant to me your grace, and when my time is done, grant to me the wisdom to lay my burdens down and rest beside you, one more flower in a sea of blooms, where nothing shall ever trouble me again.

Rose Marshall died when she was sixteen years old and on her way to her high school prom. She hasn’t been resting easy since then—Bobby Cross, the man who killed her, got away clean after running her off the road, and she’s not the kind of girl who can let something like that slide. She’s been looking for a way to stop him since before they put her body in the ground.

But things have changed in the twilight world where the spirits of the restless dead continue their “lives.” The crossroads have been destroyed, and Bobby’s protections are gone. For the first time, it might be possible for Rose to defeat him.

Not alone, though. She’ll need every friend she’s managed to make and every favor she’s managed to add to her account if she wants to stand a chance…and this may be her last chance to be avenged, since what is Bobby Cross without the crossroads?

Everything Rose knows is about to change. [Goodreads Summary]

Does Angel of the Overpass sound like something you would enjoy reading? What are you reading at the moment? 

Originally a feature called Last Year I Was Reading created by Maria from ReadingMaria. 

I liked it enough to continue on my own, but have tweaked it

 to feature Five Years Ago I Was Reading. 

(I would have gone back ten, but I read so little in 2011)

Five years ago this week I had just finished reading Rachel Hartman's Seraphina. I remember how excited I was to read Seraphina, a fantasy novel about a young woman who is trying to hide her true self now that she is the newest member of the royal court. That becomes harder to do when a member of the royal family is murdered and she is drawn into the investigation alongside Prince Lucien. Romance, mystery, court intrigue, and dragons fill the pages of this entertaining novel. I enjoyed both Seraphina and the second book in the duology, Shadow Scale. The author has another book out set in the same world, Tess of the Road, but is technically not part of the series. I have yet to read it but do have it on my TBR pile. 

Have you read Seraphina? What were you reading five years ago?

Connect Five Friday is a weekly meme where readers share a list of five books, 

read or unread, or bookish things, that share a common theme. 

Hosted by the  Kathryn of of Book Date.

In honor of National Poetry Month, this week I thought I would feature a handful of poetry books I have sitting in my TBR pile that I would like to get to in the next few months. 

The Crooked Inheritance: Poems by Marge Piercy

In these powerful, often funny, sometimes lyrical, and down-to-earth poems, Marge Piercy writes of her “crooked inheritance”—physical and personality traits from wildly mismatched parents, and in a larger sense the marvelous half-broken world we inherit. Even her hometown Detroit provides a double legacy—a slum girlhood that breeds in her both wild ambition and, where you would least expect it, a love of nature, which she discovers in the city’s elms, “the thing of beauty on grimy smoke-bleared streets.”

Some of Piercy’s strongest poems have always been political, and here are important new verses raging against the war in Iraq, the abandonment of Katrina’s victims (“People penned to die in our instant / concentration camps, just add water”), and the ongoing attempts to suppress women—their rights, their bodies, their minds, their very being: “The CIA should hire as spies / only women over fifty, because we are the truly invisible.”

Other poems are about her life on Cape Cod, where she finds sanctuary in the long natural rhythms of the year’s cycle—gardening, making pesto, hearing coyotes in the winter “yelping in chorus after a kill,” a place where after weeks of rain and snow, the “sun gives birth to rosebushes,” and “everything revealed is magical, splendid in its ordinary shining.” Here, too, are wonderful love songs, about friends, lovers, a beautiful day, animals, making bread.

Deep connections to Jewish life and ritual reveal themselves in poems about her Lithuanian grandmother, about holidays, about the peace in a time of war that ceremony can bring, “an evening of honey on the tongue . . . a puddle of amber light . . . faces of friends . . . darkness walling off the room from what lies outside.”

These marvelous poems remind us anew of the breadth and strength of Marge Piercy’s poetic vision. A superb collection to read and treasure. [Goodreads Summary]

Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne

A novel-in-verse about a young girl coming-of-age and stepping out of the shadow of her former best friend.

She looks me hard in my eyes

& my knees lock into tree trunks 

My eyes don't dance like my heartbeat racing 

They stare straight back hot daggers. 

I remember things will never be the same. 

I remember things.

Mahogany L. Browne delivers a novel-in-verse about broken promises, fast rumors, and when growing up means growing apart from your best friend.  [Goodreads Summary]

In the Lateness of the World: Poems by Carolyn Forché

A new poetry collection of uncanny grace and moral force from one of our country's most celebrated poets

Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other.

Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché envisions a place where "you could see everything at once ... every moment you have lived or place you have been." The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and "there is nothing that cannot be seen." In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today. [Goodreads Summary]

Tertulia by Vincent Toro

A fluid, expansive new collection from a poet whose work dazzles with [an] energetic exploration of the Puerto Rican experience in the new millennium (NBC News)

Puerto Rican poet Vincent Toro's new collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the tertulia) and revises it for the Latinx context in the United States. In verses dense with juxtaposition, the collection examines immigration, economics, colonialism and race via the sublime imagery of music, visual art, and history. Toro draws from his own social justice work in various U.S. cities to create a kaleidoscopic vision of the connections between the personal and the political, the local and the global, in a book that both celebrates and questions the complexities of the human condition.  [Goodreads Summary]

Lean Against This Late Hour by Garous Abdolmalekian, translated by Idra Novey & Ahmad Nadalizadeh

A vivid, affecting portrait of life in the shadow of violence and loss, for readers of both English and Persian

The first selection of poems by renowned Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian to appear in English, this collection is a mesmerizing, disorienting descent into the trauma of loss and its aftermath. In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise.

Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. "This time," a disembodied voice commands, "send us a prophet who only listens." [Goodreads Summary]

Did you read any poetry for National Poetry Month? 

Every Friday Coffee Addicted Writer from Coffee Addicted Writer poses a question which participants respond on their own blogs within the week (Friday through Thursday). They then share their links at the main site and visit other participants blogs.

Do you do most of your blog work on a computer, iPad, or phone? (submitted by Elizabeth @ Complex Chaos)

I do all of my blog work on my personal computer, although sometimes I respond to comments or blog hop on my phone. 

What about you?

 I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Be sure and tell me what you are reading and are up to!

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